By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers
Ideological systems
get individuals to come to an agreement on how the world is; ideological systems
are systems of shared belief. More commonly ideological systems can be
understood as religious, nationalist, and philosophical beliefs, as well as a
host of other connections to civic associations, and society. With the number
of potential ideological systems being potentially infinite it becomes
difficult to determine which systems are more crucial than others. Clearly,
however, not all identities are created equally. Thus the challenge is not
predicting which identity or belief system will become dominant, but merely
tracking how it becomes dominant over time and space. The triumph of one
ideological organization over another is less important than the effect that
triumph will have on the scope of the ideological subsystem as a whole.
Ideological subsystems thus are simply the rules and methods of inclusion. (For
a more detailed overview see Barry Buzan and Richard Little, International
systems in world history: remaking the study of international relations. Oxford,
2000).
Anthropologists on
the other hand tend to identify as civilizations any sort of units which have
reached a certain size, produce a significant surplus and attain a known level
of control over their environment, possess class differentiation, and build
cities. Case Study:
As for hegemons
today, however, many eyes fall on Rome; See for example Niall Ferguson,
Colossus: the price of America ‘s empire (2004) and Chalmers Johnson, The
Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (2005).
Followed shortly
thereafter by the collapse of the Western Empire as a whole, and since the
above two books contain contradictions about the fall of the Roman Empire, this
is where we will continue today.
In both Ferguson and
Johnson, core principles of hierarchical sovereignty in the Roman Empire have
been summed up with: Military reforms under Augustus and fiscal and citizenship
reforms under later emperors were a necessary condition for the collapse of
hierarchical sovereignty. The relative growth of Christianity was a necessary
condition for the decline of hierarchical sovereignty. Successful norms
entrepreneurs are a sufficient condition for a shift in sovereign principles.
Specifically norms entrepreneurs that began to replace submission with
negotiation in the diplomatic process created the sufficient conditions for
collapse.
The question that
arises with the above books however is why, the Roman international system,
shifted suddenly in the late fourth century and early fifth century AD? If a
financial crisis happens two hundred years before the rapid collapse of the
Roman international system can one say that it was this crisis that caused the
collapse, timing?
Also Paul Kennedy’s
book on imperial overstretch brought fame to this now popular subject.
Yet his The Rise and Fall of Great Powers reiterates popular narratives that
have existed throughout history. For example, the core of the imperial
overstretch argument thus focuses on the costs of maintaining an empire as the
determinant of the rise and fall of that empire. Or, as Robert M. Axelrod
points out, commitments to allies and tributary nations also incur eventually
crippling costs. (Axelrod, A Model for the Emergence of New Political Actors.
In Artificial societies: the computer simulation of social life, edited by G.
N. Gilbert and R. Conte, 1995).
In fact existing
explanations for the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West suffer from a
couple key problems. The Classic Explanation as laid out by Edward Gibbon in
his three volume “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” fever since focused
on the role of religion, barbarians, and decadence as the proximate causes of
the Roman fall. We can find in Gibbon and others a fairly simple explanation;
the shift and collapse of the Roman international system was caused by a
decadent and dissipated ruling class who were unable to suppress the esoteric
spirituality of Christianity and undermined the pragmatic, vigorous spirit of
the Roman people through their avarice. The crux of the argument is itself a
fairly rational explanation. The Roman people in the late third century found
themselves rudderless and weak. They intentionally changed how they dealt with
enemies on their frontier in the face of the barbarian onslaught. Given the
number of barbarians coming across the borders it was politically expedient to
offer citizenship to the most powerful in order to subdue the rest. The failure
of the system occurred on two levels. First, the structural shift offering
citizenship and other rights instead of seeking submission allowed a virulent and
uncivilized nation to upset the balance of power on the frontiers of the
empire. Second, the Romans were in no position to enforce a peace even if their
decision offer citizenship was fairly rational. Much of the extant written
record from the time tends to support this point of view. Ammianus Marcellinus
wrote of the Battle of Adrianople in 378 AD, “The most savage people roused
themselves and poured across the nearest frontiers.” (Ammianus as quote by C.
R. Whittaker, Frontiers of the Roman Empire: a social and economic study, 1994,
p.194.)
Other
characterizations of the Germanic people reaffirm this notion of Germania as
uncivilized in contrast to the civilized core of the Roman Empire. (See Thomas
S. Burns, Rome and the barbarians, 2003).
Within Roman writing
at the time there was a growing sense of a flood of barbarians threatening the
gates of Rome. Burns and others demonstrate fairly clearly how this is actually
difficult to confirm if not altogether wrong. (See for example The Empire and
the integration of barbarians. In Kingdoms of the Empire: the integration of
barbarians in late Antiquity, edited by Walter Pohl, 1997).
Given the disjuncture
between the written and archeological evidence many tend to discredit the Roman
discourse at the time as playing into a conservative Roman narrative that
reinforced basic Roman values and a sense of who and what Roman identity was.
The classic school however tends to view this as fundamentally unproblematic.
From this point of view the miscegenation and integration that occurs at the
frontiers of Roman Empire does not counter the fact that it was a Goth king, Oadacer, who ultimately conquered Rome and deposed the
emperor. In particular it is the failure of Rome to fill their military with
“their own” people that reinforces the basic importance of the barbarians in
this causal story. (Ramsay MacMullen, Changes in the
Roman empire, Princeton University Press, 1990).
The other side to
this issue is the effect of Christianity on the masses and upon the ruling class.
By the time of the late empire the gap between the richest patricians and the
proletariat had grown significantly. There was a massive shift in the
proletariat from a meager independence to indentured servitude to local elites.
Advancement for the
poor occurred through military service to the local gentes
and the rights of citizenship gradually disappeared for the lower classes.In this context the rise of Christianity had two
important effects. First, it allowed for an attractive spiritual alternative to
paganism which traditionally had little regard for the poor.
The esoteric
importance of the kingdom of god made their suffering on earth irrelevant, or
at least more bearable. It also created a social structure that valued decency
towards the poor. In the end though the church was most popular with what
remained of the middle class. It was from this middle class that the values of
loving the poor and giving alms to the church found its greatest support. As
Christianity rose from persecuted religion to accepted dogma the officials of
the church grew in power. The second effect of the rise of Christianity was to
introduce a powerful alternative social structure in the midst of the empire.
The bishops and presbyters were now able to collect and redistribute wealth.
Where the church was able to meaningfully distinguish between the clergy and
the laity, they were able to introduce an alternative hierarchy into Roman
society.
Classicists claim
that the Roman emperors were no longer able to motivate their people for the
great sacrifices necessary for the maintenance of the empire. An alternative
hierarchy with a separate set of underlying principles had replaced the
organizational principles that structured the Roman world. Instead of sacrifice
for the empire there was now sacrifice for the poor and for god.
These two issues, the
invasion of the barbarians and the rise of Christianity, intertwine according
to the classic argument to provide an explanation of changing sovereign
principles. Does this causal linkage actually exist? The claim most simply is
that the international system collapsed because Rome was weakened by shifting
loyalties in the poor and middle classes and found itself unable to stem the
flow of Germanic peoples into Roman territories. This is problematic in a
number of ways. The history of barbarian-Roman relations existed well before
the rise of Christianity. What changed was not the presence of barbarians, or
even likely, the number of barbarians, but instead the Romans’ ability to
control them. Even if the claim is that the failure of control stemmed from the
rising power of Christianity one would be hard pressed to show precisely how
this worked given that many of the Germanic peoples had themselves converted to
Christianity. If anything one might expect the appeal of Christianity to act as
an ideological bridge between Roman and Germanic people. More broadly this
brings up a question crucial. When did the Roman international system actually
collapse? Most scholars choose the middle of the third century AD as the
beginning of the decline. This is an attractive date for a number of reasons.
The later third century saw a succession of emperors debase the coinage, invite
inflation, and move the empire to the edge of bankruptcy. Dire though this was
the empire did persist for almost two more centuries until the last emperor,
Romulus Augustulus, was deposed.
Recent innovations in
archeology and the recovery of new historical records led many scholars to
revisit the prior claims of scholars like Gibbon. The chief revisions came in
two forms. First scholars claimed that Rome and the Roman Empire did not fall
in the way that was popularly conceived. While this claim carries a lot of
weight in regards to the Eastern Roman Empire it is more contentious in regards
to the West. Gary K.Young argues that what happened
was a geographic refocusing from the Mediterranean around which Rome was always
salient to the Near East where the Eastern Empire retained its glory for quite
a long time and eventually transformed into Byzantium. (Young, 2001. Rome ‘s
eastern trade: international commerce and imperial policy, 31 BC-AD 305, 2001).
The west, in Young’s
formulation did not fall, but became irrelevant. The loss of Britain and Gaul
were not defeats, but concessions. Byzantium simply had no great regard for
these provinces as the empire shifted eastward. Second rather than falling at
the hands of barbarians the Western Roman Empire was actually revived by these
barbarians. Following a variant of the noble savage narrative the barbarians
conquering of Rome rescued a moribund empire and infused it with a new, vital
spirit. The claims from the revisionist school have been quite useful in
expanding our understanding of who the barbarians were and what Roman/barbarian
relations were like in the late Empire.
But the revisionist
argument is quite weak in being able to demonstrate how or why there was a
fundamental shift in sovereignty at the end of the fifth century AD. In part
this is because it was never a stated goal to explain this shift, but also
because it fundamentally rejects the view of the shift. Although the
revisionist argument altered our understanding of the character of the collapse
in the west it did not fundamentally alter the classic claims about the
relationship of sovereignty to the fall. The character of the barbarians is
largely irrelevant in the context of what they did.
According to
supporters of the theory of imperial overstretch the rising commitments to
defense seem inevitable and thus the decline of a power is itself inevitable.
The problem is that it becomes impossible to specify. For example, when
Augustus finally achieved final victory over his rivals he found himself in
charge of a bloated and undependable military. Offering retirement incentives to
the many of the soldiers he reduced the army and cavalry by more than half from
seventy legions to twenty eight. (See Steven K. Drummond and Lynn H. Nelson.
The western frontiers of imperial Rome, 1994).
This left in his
command his most loyal and most veteran soldiers. This had a profound effect on
the Western portion of the empire. Many of the retired soldiers settled in
colonies in Spain, Gaul, and modern day Germany. The process of Romanization
for those peoples was significantly aided by these soldier settlers. Augustus
also looked at the boundaries of the Roman Empire and found that expanding them
through pre-emptive war was no longer strategically expedient. This would in
the long run have a profound effect on Roman sovereignty. As I mentioned earlier
the principle of hierarchical belonging inherent in this principle created,
over time, a tension between those in power who were disinclined to share power
and those who had remained loyal and essentially Roman for a long period of
time. This tension had one significant safety valve: the outward expansion of
the empire. As new peoples were conquered they filled in the lower ranks of the
hierarchy and subsequently lower ranks of nations and people moved up. In 48 AD
the emperor Claudius oversaw a debate in the Senate regarding whether some Gauls ought to be able to seek office in the Senate. In the
debate we see this basic tension reiterated.
The senators
according Tacitus argued on behalf of keeping the Senate in Roman hands as the
Rome had done well in the past to do so. Claudius responded by saying: My
ancestors, the most ancient of whom was made at once a citizen and a noble of
Rome, encourage me to govern by the same policy of transferring to this city
all conspicuous merit, wherever found. We had unshaken peace at home; we
prospered in all our foreign relations, in the days when Italy beyond the Po
was admitted to share our citizenship, and when, enrolling in our ranks the
most vigorous of the provincials, under colour of
settling our legions throughout the world, we recruited our exhausted empire.
(Tacitus as quoted in Annals MIT, August 5 2005(Book XI), see also:
http://classics.mit.edu/Tacitus/annals.html).
Claudius goes on to
note that the great failing of Sparta and Athens was their inability to
reconcile with the enemies that they fought in wars. Clearly, the words of
Camillus were resonant in Claudius’ logic. The tension would remain, but in
crucial moments it was resolved in favor of the underlying sovereign principle.
Hierarchical sovereignty was still an entrenched and stable principle of rule.
As time went on subsequent emperors deviated from this tradition. Part of this
was a practical issue: a defensive empire was less able to use the safety valve
inherent in the sovereign principle. Ultimately, the allure of the empire
allowed interested Germanic peoples on Rome ’s northern frontier to immigrate
and settle for quite a long time. In the middle of the fourth century AD the
ideas enshrined in the operating principle of sovereignty were effectively
defunct. The principle of sovereignty had changed from, ‘From support comes
belonging as long and as far as it is profitable and practical’ to something
more akin to an interpersonal realism where the decision to extend a place
within the hierarchy was determined not by support, but by threat. Whittaker,
for example, notes that the emperor Julian employed the barbarian Chiaretto and his men as an irregular military unit against
the Franks while never requiring submission by Chiaretto
himself. Whittaker goes on to note that during this period, “Frontier ideology
. . . far from adapting to assimilation, became more extreme in its praise of
traditional Roman values and superiority.” He was also charged with murder
among things. (Encyclopedia, The Columbia. 2005. Stilicho, Flavius (6th)
Columbia University Press, 2005, see also:
http://www.bartleby.com/65/st/Stilicho.html).
The decreasing
openness of Roman society combined with its increasing brutality served to
impose a certain rigidity upon the already hierarchical principles that girded
the Roman international order and ultimately to invert that core principle.
Instead of a pragmatic sovereign principle that extended belonging through the
act of submission, belonging was now extended by right of being able to oppose
the will of the Empire. The strongest barbarian leaders were rewarded with the
most land and treasure while the weakest were conquered.
Thus a fundamental
shift had occurred and ultimately dictated the collapse of the Roman
international system. The new sovereign principle dictated that the relations
between neighboring peoples be negotiated based upon relative power and enmity
and not upon submission or amity. It was inevitable that the final days of the
empire saw the confrontation of armies led by barbarians both on the Roman and
Goth sides. In these confrontations the Romans were no longer able to demand
submission though they were willfully blind to this predicament. The Roman
general Stilicho, a Vandal himself, was arrested and executed on the charges of
making secret deals with the German king Alaric in the beginning of the fifth
century.
While the substance of
the claim was true the intent was trumped up. The meetings with Alaric were
designed to mediate a peace between Rome and the Germans, as opposed to the
usual tactic of destroying enemies. The Romans no longer able to defend
themselves had become a feeble and fanciful negotiator rather than ruler of the
realm. Still in denial the Roman core saws its peripheral territories crumbling
around it. The shift in sovereignty was not an intentional one, but an
expedient one. Roman pro-consuls and generals who ruled the frontier
territories had begun to develop news rules of organization in the century
leading up to this fateful period. The process of Romanization had ceased to
meaningful. Citizenship was extended indiscriminately so that while more and
more people got citizenship it had less and less to do with merit, and it
provided fewer and fewer tangible benefits. Citizenship was being extended to
placate frontier peoples so that they would contribute to defense without
consideration of whether they had sufficiently earned citizenship. Meanwhile
the benefits of that citizenship were mostly superficial. Many may have
regretted it, but the exigencies of self defense
necessitated the break up of the Roman international
system. It was not the cost of the system, but the willingness of the
participants that dictated the changing organizational principles. Decisions to
simultaneously negotiate with non-submissive enemies and haphazardly extend
citizenship rights to those that would defend against these enemies had the short
term effect of undermining and twisting the sovereign principle of the Roman
Empire . It had the long term effect of breaking down the Roman international
order. As soon as norms entrepreneurs began to experiment with new sovereign
principle one can see how relationships with the marcher kingdoms shifted
rather dramatically. This produced a cascade effect with the Roman world. An
anarchic realism was introduced to the periphery and it filtered on through to
the core. The most proximate cause of all of this was the inversion of the long
standing sovereign principle. We arrive at a fairly compelling explanation of
the collapse of the Roman international system. It did not happen suddenly with
defeat of Rome at the hands of Oadacer in 475, but it
did not happen gradually through overstretch, stagnation, or a slow painful
decadence. Instead decisions made by increasingly autonomous pro-consuls on the
frontier of the Roman Empire worked quickly to undermine longstanding
organizational principles that patterned the system. This led precipitously to
a crumbling of that system from outside in. A strongly patterned hierarchy gave
way to a nascent anarchy.
Existing explanations
for the fall of Rome thus are ultimately unconvincing. Certain variables like
the presence of barbarians or the rise of Christianity or the financial crises
thus either occurred well before the collapse of the system or did not vary
from before the collapse to after the collapse. Other variables like social
innovation cannot be adequately proven to exist, but they play a crucial role
in theories of stagnation. How can one know if a society has reached the limits
of its inventiveness? To claim that is has and that those limits led to an
international collapse is ultimately an unsatisfying conclusion. Shortly before
the collapse or the empire the network of social relations that the empire had
created ground to a halt. In order to stabilize the frontier the emperors had
to invert this basic principle. The idea of Rome had failed. Why? The sudden
change in sovereignty may provide a satisfying explanation of the collapse of
the Roman international system, but it is unsatisfying in the larger scheme of
things. Why did sovereignty take the form that it did and what happened to
change it? Why are sovereign principles meaningful at one point and meaningless
at some subsequent point and might be due to the relative spatial limits of the
underlying social subsystems.
In fact the Roman
hierarchical sovereignty was stable for nearly eight hundred years, but the
Roman world changed a great deal in that time. It evolved from a regional power
to rapidly expanding republic and finally to one of the largest and most stable
empires that the world has ever known. Recognizing this one might take issue
with the idea that space could have anything to do with the formation and
evolution of Roman sovereignty. The spatial limits of Roman society were
constantly growing. The very nature of Roman sovereignty necessitated an
expanding Roman world. Furthermore, Roman elite’s strategic ambitions led the
city-state to expand its domain aggressively. Up until the time of Augustus the
borders were expanding so quickly that one would be hard-pressed to pick any
specific period of time where one could say that all of the social subsystems
had not changed in some way or another. This little about the absolute size of
any given subsystem, but the size of each in relation to the others; it is the
relative size that matters. Roman military strategy from its early victories
over the Samnites through the rule of Augustus was largely focused on
preemptive war. It was not a for-profit endeavor. The immediate effect of these
conquests was to draw in vast amounts of booty that was distributed according
to predetermined methods to the soldiers in the army, but the booty was not the
goal. Instead the pattern of Roman conquests can be understood more through the
logic of preemptive warfare. Contrary to the expectations of offensive or
defensive realism the Romans consistently ignored their weaker neighbors and
invited and instigated wars against their nearest competitors. (See John J.
Mearsheimer, The tragedy of Great Power politics, 2001).
During the period of
Italian consolidation these opponents were the Samnites and the Hellenic
city-states of Italy. Under the veil of alliance the Romans consistently
violated the agreements upon which the alliance was based until the Samnites
were forced to attack. At this point the Carthaginians, and Macedonian kingdoms
were still the big fish and the Romans invited no conflict. The successive
conquests of the Samnites, King Pyrrhus, and Tarentum, announced to these big
fish that the Romans were a force to be reckoned with. Once Italy was
consolidated the Romans moved almost immediately to invite conflict with the
Carthaginians and the Macedonians. Under the pretext of defending a revolting
Sicilian city-state, Messana, the Romans began the
Punic Wars with the Carthaginians. The Punic Wars which followed were
incredibly brutal. But what we see from the Punic Wars and the Macedonian Wars
was a consistent application of the principle of military strategy that had
guided the Roman military for centuries prior. Roman military strategy before
Augustus ascension was predicated on forcing confrontations with their strongest
foes in order to create pretext for war. The tactical superiority of the Romans
gave them the advantage in this risky endeavor. Their willingness to sacrifice
huge numbers of troops and their ability to inflict unacceptable losses on
their enemy formed the core of Roman battlefield strategy for most of this
period. Roman strategy was more or less fixed through this period of expansion,
but the organizational structure of the Roman military and the Roman state
changed rather drastically. By the end of the Punic Wars Roman military
commitments required the professionalization of the Roman military. Early Roman
wars were fought by citizen-soldiers who moved fluidly from their farms to the
legions.
Later Roman wars were
fought by professional soldiers who devoted their lives to the military. The
civil wars that erupted at the end of the Punic Wars were largely a result of
the heavy cost paid by proletariat soldiers as increasing military commitments
made it more and more difficult to tend the farms. After the
professionalization of the troops it was not a far leap to an independent and
powerful military. During the period of oligarchy and competition that preceded
the accession of Augustus the various commanders who would be emperor including
Pompey, Crassus, Caesar, and Marc Antony all used their power to give
themselves command of armies loyal to them. The last century of the Republic
saw the separation of the army from the and from Senatorial control. By the
time Augustus became emperor the army was bloated and disloyal, but it was
nonetheless still pursuing a path of expansion through preemptive war.
The growth of the
Republic through this entire period followed a fairly structured process.
Military conquest yielded new territories, new labor, new markets, and new
soldiers, but these things independent of each other could not define the form
of sovereignty that developed. A deeply entrenched policy of preemptive war
does not explain the social policy of Romanization or the economic policies
that favored agricultural development over trade. Economic development did not
expand equally with Roman conquest, but rather followed after it. Two different
processes contributed to the economic development of regions conquered by the
expanding Roman Republic. The first piece was the redistribution of treasure
through the soldiers. The booty from conquest was distributed proportionately
through the army based upon rank and class. As time went on, the redistribution
of treasure began to skew more and more towards the elites—legates, centurions,
tribunes, and the equestrian class. However, the distribution of the spoils of
war did not have a lasting effect on the conquered territories except that it
reinforced basic role structures already inherent in the Roman economy. The
social order produced by the Roman system favored the ownership of land over
the acquisition of wealth through trade or other merchant professions. (John H.
D'Arms, Commerce and social standing in ancient Rome,
Harvard University Press, in Finley, M. I., The ancient economy. Updated / ed,
Sather classical lectures, 1981, v. 43).
What was more
important therefore was not the distribution of the treasure including the
conquered land, but the pursuit, settlement, and development of that land. This
was pursued as well by Roman citizens moving to recently conquered areas in the
hope of increasing their holdings and their wealth. While the Roman Empire was
highly developed economically the social value of land holding over trade
created a relatively decentralized economy given its size. (Keith Hopkins,
Rome, Taxes, Rents, and Trade. In The ancient economy, edited by W. Scheidel and S. v. Reden, 2002).
Military conquest
always preceded economic development, but it was not the core principle of the
economy. Economic role structures in the republic flowed from the leisure and
self-sufficiency that one was able to purchase for one’s self. Numerous elites
were engaged remotely as financiers in mercantile trades because of their
ability to generate profits, but this profit-making was not the organization
principle of Roman economic society. (Fik Meijer and Onno van Nijf, Trade, transport,
and society in the ancient world: a sourcebook, 1992).
More money allowed
elites to purchase more nobility. Production of wine, olive oil, and other
agricultural products fueled much of the Roman economy. (Clementina Panellaand Andre Tchernia,
Agricultural Products Transported in Ampohorae: Oil
and Wine. In The ancient economy, edited by W. Scheidel
and S. v. Reden, 2002).
Contrary to the
suggestion that Rome followed a legionnaire economy predicated on the conquests
of the Roman military one finds that these conquests merely extended the area
under which a preexisting economic role structures might expand into. The
settlement of conquered lands by soldiers and elites and the migration to those
lands by other Roman citizens explains the pattern of economic development in
the expanding Roman imperium, but does not describe the pattern of sovereignty
that emerged. Once the lands were settled Roman trade extended well beyond the
frontiers of the Roman Empire, however the density of this trade and importance
of it to the Roman economy suggests that it was less than crucial to the basic
economic well-being of the empire. There was a widespread desire for Roman
goods, but the Romans themselves discounted the meaningfulness of this desire
and were not a trading empire as the Carthaginians. This pattern seems to hold
for much of early and middle Roman expansion. The relative valuation of agricultural
life and production and the importance of social hierarchy to the military
structure provide a good sense of the role structures that existed in
republican Rome. The policies of preemptive war, immigration, development, and
settlement describe the spatial expansion of the Roman imperium.
Yet there is still an
element of Roman social organization that cannot be explained by either of
these spheres. Key to Rome ’s economic expansion was its policy of extending
Roman citizenship and Romanization. This of course has been a common theme in
Roman histories since Polybius wrote his Histories shortly after the Punic
Wars. This aspect of Roman expansion is widely discussed. What it discussed
less is that during this period Rome was also quite open to adopting the
cultural practices of the conquered peoples. The combined effect of both these
practices allowed for the rapid integration of neighboring peoples and must seen as a crucial aspect of what Mann terms Rome’s
extensive organization capacity. The principle of, ‘From support comes
belonging as long and as far as it is profitable and practical’ draws deeply
from these cultural practices. Roman citizenship was extended according to two
different categories: civitas optimo iure, and civitas sine suffragio.
These were respectively full citizenship with voting rights and citizenship
with comparable duties, but lacking the right to vote. The measured extension
of these forms of citizenship formed one element of the Romanization process.
The other elements were the mutual exchange of cultural practices. For extended
periods cities in southern Italy, in particular parts of Magna Graecia,
maintained the use of Greek offices, ceremonies, and religious ceremonies. (see
Kathryn Lomas, Urban elites and cultural definition: Romanization in southern
Italy. In Urban society in Roman Italy, edited by T. Cornell and K. Lomas,
1995).
Part of this
reflected Roman policy that considered non- Roman practices acceptable so long
as formal submission was complete. However part of this, Lomas further argues,
reflected the influence of Greek philosophy, art, religion, and social
organization upon Roman elites. Greek culture became popular among the Roman
elites. In this we can get a better view of the process of Romanization. Part
of Romanization was indeed the introduction of Roman law and religion into the
conquered regions, but another significant aspect was the allowances and
stature given to native cultures. As Lomas puts it, “In the most basic sense,
all Italians were Roman by virtue of citizenship. Even where Hellenism
continued to flourish, there was a Roman administrative structure and a large
Roman and Italian admixture to the population.” (Ibid. pg. 116).
Greek culture,
continues Lomas, played an integral role in the identities of Roman elites and
thus experienced not only a continuation of Greek cultural practices, but
indeed a revival. Other cultures could flourish as long as Roman administration
and domination were acknowledged.
Another practice in
Roman ideological expansion was the relative marginalization of the status of
the original families and the added emphasis placed upon one’s
nobility—understood in the original meaning of conspicuousness. Patrician
families retained their status, but that status opened up to individuals
capable of producing renown for themselves. For Flower this was reflected in
the priority placed upon public spectacles in Roman society. The ability of an
elite to host games, parades, and other public entertainment ensured that
person’s ability to rise through the political ranks. Certainly, this led to
and explains the opulent behavior of many of the contending oligarchs of the
late first century BC. (Harriet I. Flower, Spectacle and Political Culture in
the Roman Republic. In The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Republic , 2004,
pg. 324).
What can be said more
generally about this practice is that it almost assuredly reflects an obsession
with one’s personal fortune and the fortune of Rome at large. Part of Rome ’s
claim to hegemony was based on the religious belief that the gods, in
particular the goddess Fortune, favored the Romans. The great displays of Roman
dominance especially triumphal parades, reflected this dominance. With the
respect to the native culture which Roman ideology overtook there was never a
question of the superiority of not only Roman tactics, but also of Roman
ideology. A narrative that gets consistently reproduced in Roman writing and
artifacts is the greatness of Rome as evidenced by the spectacles that its
greatest figures, were able to produce. (Ibid. pg. 339).
We can take from this
narrative two different strands of thought important to this research. First,
the essential pattern of Roman ideology was quite complex. It was
simultaneously predicated on a principle of Roman cultural superiority and a
noncommittal principle of live and let live. Sovereign submission then cannot
be tied to any ideology since citizenship was extended regardless of cultural
practice.
However submission
was tied to the public acknowledgement of Roman cultural superiority. One
cannot say that Roman ideology dictated the form of Roman sovereignty. One can
say however that the specific hierarchies of Roman belonging were deeply
influenced by Roman belief structures. At the same time a second thread becomes
apparent: the process of Romanization was intrinsically tied to the process of
Roman development. The extension of Roman colonies into Italy, North Africa,
and Southern Europe did not follow a pure economic principle. Nearly coincident
with this economic expansion was an ideological structuration of the
relationships between the barbarians, the Roman immigrants, and the conquering
soldier elite. For the Romans economic development was also a form of
ideological change. Indeed, Strabo the Geographer notes that as the Germanic
tribes became Romanized they pursued agricultural modes of production. (See The
Geography of Strabo: Literarlly translated, with
notes, in three volumes. Edited by H. C. Hamilton and W. Falconer. London:
George Bell & Sons 1903, 4.1).
This is significant.
If the Roman Empire truly favored trade over agricultural pursuits we ought to
expect the people being Romanized to pursue trade as well. That agriculture and
land-holding became a priority among the Germanic tribes tells us a great deal
about the process of economic expansion. Because of the centrality of nobility
to economic role structures Romanization encouraged the purchase of leisure.
Roman superiority was recognized through the greatness of the Roman
infrastructure and the spectacle of Roman politics. Thus following on the heels
of Roman domination was Roman ideology. Philosophy is most certainly not
relevant to tradesmen, but is relevant to submission. (Tacitus implicitly
agrees with this assessment in his work on Germany. In The Complete Works of
Tacitus, edited by T. P.Collection, 1942, Chapter
14).
A policy of
preemptive war furthermore led the Romans to conquer and expand rapidly, but
one cannot expect that the conquered peoples all submitted similarly. The Roman
sovereign principle effectively allows for the economic and ideological
subsystems expansion while also allowing for a wide variety of administrative
possibilities in a way that equal recognition fundamentally precludes. ‘From
support comes belonging’ also implies a privileged position for those that are
empowered to determine support. In this way Romans were always in control of
the process of Romanization while simultaneously managing the practical limits
of an aggressive, expansive empire.
The Romans always
retained the final say-so in the submission of a domain to the Roman Empire.
Potential client states could not join the Roman international order without
the explicit agreement of Roman rulers. This may seem obvious, but it is worth
noting regardless.
Thus, a long standing
principle of hierarchical sovereignty was effectively used to structure the
Roman imperium through its most expansive stage. In fact one should distinction
between the imperium which was under the control of the Republic and the empire
that was established by Augustus. Or as we exemplified above, the military
would conquer and occupy new territories and in the generation or so afterwards
it would be settled and Romanized. This experience did not always happen
smoothly, but it was almost inevitable. The tactical superiority of the Roman
armies and the immense wealth generated by the Roman economy proved too much
for the kingdoms that Rome judged a threat. The purpose of conquest was not
purely economic, strategic, or cultural, but rather it was an amalgam of
various motives. By the end of the republic many of the motives for expansion
were not raison d’etat, but were instead driven by
the personal ambitions of optimates like Caesar, Callus, Pompey, and later Marc
Antony and Octavius. Through the civil wars of the late Republic the army and
the society became divided by these personal ambitions. Thus while sovereign
policy remained largely the same the apparatus for unifying the vast
territories of the imperium had fallen into disrepair. Furthermore as we have
seen, along standing principle of hierarchical
sovereignty was effectively used to structure the Roman imperium through its
most expansive stage. The tactical superiority of the Roman armies and the
immense wealth generated by the Roman economy proved too much for the kingdoms
that Rome judged a threat. The purpose of conquest was not purely economic,
strategic, or cultural, but rather it was an amalgam of various motives. By the
end of the republic many of the motives for expansion were not raison d’etat, but were instead driven by the personal ambitions
of optimates like Caesar, Callus, Pompey, and later Marc Antony and Octavius.
Through the civil wars of the late Republic the army and the society became
divided by these personal ambitions. Thus while sovereign policy remained
largely the same the apparatus for unifying the vast territories of the
imperium had fallen into disrepair. In fact one should distinction
between the imperium which was under the control of the Republic and the empire
that was established by Augustus. The Senate, driven as it was by personal
ambition and loyalty to allied patrician families, was unable to reign in
generals and governors who sought to increase the own nobility. Augustus’
defeat of Marc Antony at Actium granted him victory, but also forced him to
reorganize the Roman government more effectively and end the civil wars and
intrigue that had plagued the empire. He installed himself as ruler of the
military while restoring the senate to some of it
former glory. He gave himself the titles of imperator (ruler of the military)
and princeps (first citizen). These titles would later be used to effectively
neuter the Senate and any of the last vestiges of the republic. However under
Augustus, whether as a matter of strategy or principle, the Senate had at least
the appearance of power and efficacy. The rule of Augustus brought major
changes to the structure of the Roman Empire though the sovereign principle
that ruled it remained the same. Augustus, consolidated the military and
reduced its size nearly in half. This as we indicated, had two effects on
the Roman Empire . First, the reduced fighting force was loyal to Augustus, but
insufficient for expanding the borders of the Empire in any profound way. Second
the soldiers dismissed from the army were given various incentives to settle in
colonies in the Roman frontier. On the one hand the prior process of military
expansion was temporarily halted and on the other hand the process of
Romanization was greatly accelerated. Whatever the motives of Augustus, his
reign saw an important shift towards a defensive empire managed by a cadre of
bureaucrats loyal to Augustus.
Subsequent emperors
in the Julio-Claudian line ignored Augustus’ advice and expanded into Britain,
Dacia, and the Parthian Empire. This was a more measured expansion and based
less on preemptive war, and more on the pursuit of nobility. Augustus’ rule
brought with it a shift in the organizing principle of the security The
diffusion of the Roman security subsystem slowed, stagnated, and calcified into
the limes that were the line of defense for the rest of the Roman Empire. The
professionalization of the military and the settlement of ex-soldiers in the
frontier colonies had furthermore the effect of increasing the rate of
Romanization. While local customs were allowed to remain, Roman institutions
and culture were installed as the lingua franca of the empire. By 212 BC the
misguided and brutal emperor Caracalla simultaneous riled the barbarian tribes
on the frontier while also granting citizenship to every alien, except the most
recently submitted, in the Roman Empire. In one fell swoop he ensured that
citizenship would expand rapidly and become meaningless. The association of
citizenship with submission and belonging were effectively severed for the
moment. Luckily for the Empire his reign was short and ended unsurprisingly in
his murder. Yet his reforms are evidence of a nascent instability in the
empire. Indeed his reign and the reign of his father, Septimus
Severus, saw the beginning of the near collapse of the empire in the middle to
late third century. The diffusion of Roman ideology through the relocations of
Romans slowed while the diffusion of ideology through submission was
accelerated to the point where citizenship eventually became virtually devoid
of content. While this period has signaled to many the beginning of the decline
of the empire the sovereign principle which defined the Roman Empire remained
constant. The dual processes of a decreasing rate of territorial growth along
with an increasing rate of Romanization make clear that a change in principles
by itself cannot explain the shifting meaning of sovereignty. What remained
important in this discussion is that the seeds of the destruction of the empire
were planted at the very outset of the empire. Augustus, moderate and savvy as
he was, had fundamentally altered the process of Roman expansion and the
substance of Roman domination in the international system. The Roman Empire
continued to be structured by the principle of belonging through submission,
but the issue of how far and how long was practical was suddenly unclear. It
must be said that Roman conquest of the entire world as would be required by
the process of expansion and idea of Rome was never actually possible.
Ultimately, Augustus was right to halt the policy of preemptive war, but in so
doing he created long term problems that he could not have foreseen. Even
shortly after Augustus’ reign, during the rule of the Emperor Claudius there is
a telling shift in the perception of the empire. In Galgacus’
view for example peace is a desert and the act of submission leads to no good.
The Romans are no longer superior, but are “rapacious”. This rapacity and the
demand for uniformity is what Peter Brown claimed, both united the Empire
through a “sleight of hand”, but also what ultimately led to its rejection on
the frontiers of the empire. Brown, The world of late antiquity, AD 150-750,
1971).
This view is not
surprising given the Britons imminent conquest, but it is telling all the same
that very basis of Roman dominion, the idea of Rome, was being critiqued and
not the fact of Roman dominance. Thus even where the Romans were expanding the
societies were less organized, but their submission was less complete and more
troublesome. At the same time that the process of expansion was stagnating and
the process of Romanization was accelerating the Roman economy was alternately
collapsing and deurbanizing. After successive devaluations in Roman currency
and the subsequent economic collapse of the empire in the third century AD the
economy began to undergo a profound shift. The society had become increasingly
stratified according to class. Plus, as the locus of power shifted to the east
the draw of Rome as the center of economic activity began to break apart. The
center could not hold. It was as if the sun had gone out and the planets spun
off into oblivion. For better or for worse the Roman economy was structured by
a pyramid principle and where Rome retained its overall relevance as the
center of Christianity for some time, the economic crises of the second
century and decreasing relevance of towns on the frontier ensured that the
basic principle had been corrupted. The roads that held the empire together
distributed trade, wealth, and role structures hierarchically from the larger
cities to smaller cities and then to outlying areas. As the cities became
irrelevant so too did the roads. Inexorably, inevitably this led Rome itself to
become irrelevant as well. This shift away from Rome happened almost
concurrently with the rejection of the Rome principle of sovereignty when the
death of the emperor Theosdosius broke the empire
into two in 395 AD. But It was not decadence, nor Christianity. Nor was it the
size of the empire, or its cost that foretold Rome ’s famous decline, but the
very ambition of its sovereign principle and the evolution of the social
structure that eroded the edifice upon which it stood. For imperial overstretch
and stagnation, the economic collapse of the mid to late third century AD
happened almost one hundred fifty years before the sack of Rome by Alaric in
408 AD. While this collapse may have been a harbinger of things to come it was
itself not a proximate cause. Regarding the presence of barbarians there was no
flood to speak of. There were numerous barbarians even before the formation of
the empire and certainly during the reign of the empire. Their mere presence is
a non-issue. The ability and willingness of the Romans to integrate them was
however. Additionally the meaningfulness of that inclusion to new Germanic
immigrants had also steadily decreased. Roman citizenship ceased to hold the
value that it had in the past.
Conclusion: As we have seen, the Romans began with a large security
subsystem relative to the others and they expanded accordingly. The ideological
and economic subsystems were relatively equal to each other, but grew behind
the security subsystem. According to the theory that I have put forward this
favored a constantly expanding zone of hierarchical sovereignty. The
impracticality of Roman sovereignty was not the key issue. It was the pragmatic
choice to create a loyal military and a defensive empire that proved fatal in
the long run. This shift caused the security subsystem to collapse relative to
the other systems. By the middle of the fourth century the security subsystem
was relatively the same size as the economic subsystem, which had stagnated,
while the ideological subsystem continued to expand. The net effect of these
changes to the subsystems relative to each other shifted the empire into an
inherently unstable state. There was no sovereign principle which could
efficiently solve the underlying spatial problems of this shift.
The effects of these
changes spread slowly through empire. The shifts were felt first in the
frontiers where the diffusion of Roman ideology accelerated while the spread of
the Roman military slowed and eventually halted. In so doing the requirement of
submission became weaker and weaker. Concurrently an increasingly frantic and
conservative narrative became entrenched in the relocated Romans on the
frontier. This narrative espoused a closed version of Roman identity and
intentionally excluded the new and prospective submissive populations. Nations
that sought to join the empire received a meaningless grant of citizenship and
were simultaneously asked to defend their new compatriots. By the fifth century
land allotments to barbarian tribes in exchange for submission had become so
extensive.
Following our
introduction and chart at the top of this page, we thus argued that the order
shifted from an expansive security system that was followed by a relatively
equal growth in the ideological and economic subsystems to an order where the
security subsystem stagnated while the ideological subsystem continued to grow
and the economic subsystem began to collapse. The Roman Empire, which had been
predicated on hierarchical sovereignty, shifted suddenly towards the third type
of unstable order. The proconsuls on the frontier of the Western Roman Empire
began casting about for some solution to the growing inefficiencies of Roman
rule finally settling on the expedient, but ultimately destructive policy of
defensive realism. By the end, the Roman form of hierarchical sovereignty was
totally inefficient. But the underlying shift that had occurred left the empire
in a hopeless state. No possible innovation in sovereignty could have saved the
empire. Norms entrepreneurs could flail about, as Stilicho did, but nothing
would save the empire. Indeed, the only policy options open to the Romans was
to change the inherent nature of the empire, to pull back from their imperial
ambitions, to resist the inclusion of any more nations, and possibly to eject
some nations from the Roman Empire. None of these courses of action were
actually politically feasible. Fattened on the glory of Rome it is hard to
imagine any self-respecting Roman citizen favoring a moderate and measured
twilight. The idea of Rome had developed over the course of centuries and while
the institutional changes imposed by Augustus during the beginning of empire
would ultimately undermine this idea it was to be another four centuries until
the idea was finally bankrupt. It was the actions of Rome ’s first and greatest
emperor that lead it down the long road to perdition. We next move on and
present our new investigation about European and Chinese Statehoodt:
For example how, do
we explain why many non-Chinese regimes who ruled
parts or all of North China and the southern steppe - notably the Jin dynasty, founded by the semi-nomadic Jurchen of
Manchuria - build walls against their northern neighbours
in the 12th century when their southern neighbors, the long-lasting (Chinese)
Song dynasty, made little use of "long walls" despite being on the
defensive against determined attack from the steppe? In fact just as today's
Chinese authorities cannot exercise total command of the internet, Chinese
imperial courts were rarely in full control of their frontiers, (nor, indeed,
of migration across the Siberian and Xinjiang borders). Then, as now,
government intentions were frequently disrupted, diverted or subverted by local
realities, which in many cases became the drivers of events at state level.
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